Six Things I Wish I Knew Ten Years Ago

We’ve been in business now for 10 years. In terms of Internet businesses, that’s a fairly long time. In that time, we’ve learned a lot. We’ve made mistakes. We’ve worked with some great people. I thought it would be fun to write a list of the advice I’d like to go back in time and give myself when we first opened our “virtual” doors.

1. Hire an accountant to do your taxes. No, really. Do it. Worth every penny. You’ll never want to gouge out your eyes with forks again.
2. Take time for your own website. Even when you are busy. One day, you won’t be as busy and you’ll wish you’d invested in keeping your own business current.
3. Set boundaries. Just because someone emails you at 10 PM, doesn’t mean you have to respond at 10PM. That’s the beauty of email.
4. Go to conferences and network. We opened our business in March of 2006, but didn’t attend our first conference until December of 2013. And it blew our minds. there was so much going on in our own world that we didn’t know about. It can get very isolating to work from home. You miss things.
5. Read and comment on tech blogs. I was always a blog read and blog writer. Even back in 2003 I had a blog where I wrote about my pregnancy, shared pictures of my kids. I read a lot of other “mommy blogs” but I didn’t read nerd blogs. And I hardly ever commented. There was a lot of good stuff to be learned, so now I subscribe to a lot of blogs and follow along with what’s happening.
6. Start using WordPress right away. We started building sites the old fashioned way, with good old HTML and CSS. Then we stumbled through a few other CMS’s before settling on WordPress. I know now why it’s the best and why it’s so popular, but I wish I could tell myself to start even earlier. (Although in fairness our first WordPress site was in 2006 – but it took a while to convert to being a WordPress-Only shop.)

Those are just a few of the things that come to mind when I think about the early days of Sumy Designs. We’ve sure come a long way, and I’m looking forward to writing another post in another ten years, to see what I’d tell myself now.